Maybe ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ it was not the festival of cameos and easter eggs that Marvel usually has us used to. There was no surprise appearance of Doctor Death, nor was the Baxter Building intuited in the background, but that does not mean that, in addition to a heartfelt tribute to Chadwick Boseman, it was also a compilation of past, present and future moments of the UCM, with cameos of those that if you blink you lose yourself and scenes that are irremediably reminiscent of others from the past. Let’s take a look!
Beware, there are spoilers for the sequel to ‘Black Panther’. If you read something you don’t like, don’t send your underwater army against us.
a little book
In the footage of ‘Ant-man and the wasp: Quantumania’ that was screened at Comic-Con, it was seen that our hero had used the time to write his memoirs, ‘Watch out for the little guy’ (something like ‘Watch out for the little guy’). In the sequel to ‘Black Panther’, while Anderson Cooper talks about Wakanda on CNN, he reads in a skirt that Scott Lang was still on tour promoting his autobiography. A small wink for the most anxious.
New Asgard
There is no time for crying: during the next broadcast on CNN, in which the death of Queen Ramonda is reported, a tailpiece talks about a treaty that takes place in New Asgarda site that was introduced in ‘Avengers: Endgame’ and that still standing. Although in the Marvel Universe, you never know how long beautiful things will last us.
The word that starts with M
Not exactly an easter egg, but a symbol that Kevin Feige is going to normalize the word “mutant” many years before we see the X-Men on the big screen. If in ‘Ms Marvel’ it was the protagonist who found out about his mutation, here we are introduced to the second official MCU mutant (if we don’t count Charles Xavier in ‘Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness’): neither more nor less than Namor. It must be said that, unlike Kamala Khan, Namor is indeed a mutant in the comics: in fact he is the son of an Atlantean and a mutant. He’s not the first character we think of when we hear the word, but he’s a good nod to the future Marvelite.
Namor speaking Latin
There were not a few who left the cinema thinking about the reason why Namor ends up speaking Latin in one of his final scenes from ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’. The sentence in question is not trivial: “Imperius Rex” is his motto in comics since 1959, on the pages of number 87 of ‘Tales to astonish’. By the way, the character, at that time, had already existed for two decades, being one of the first characters created by Marvel. Come on, his phrase makes sense, although the film did not prepare us for it.
all to the same university
Riri Williams studies at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is considered little less than a prodigy. We have all heard about MIT in different series and movies, but the most curious thing is that it is where Ned and MJ end up at the end from ‘Spiderman: No way home’, which opens up the potential for cameos and crossovers. Peter Parker, for his part, has his future more uncertain than ever. oh! Tony Stark also studied at MIT, the place to go if you’re smart and a superhero, too.
The first Black Panther
Marvel has a golden opportunity to tell stories from your universe’s past, and in ‘Wakanda Forever’ he has opened, a little, that door. When Shuri recreates the heart herb, Nakia comments that it’s the best thing that’s happened to them “since Bashenga”. Olumo Bashenga was the first chronological Black Panther in the comics., which debuted in 1977, on the pages of number 7 of, precisely, ‘Black Panther’. Coming from the Bronze Age, his identity as the first Black Panther was later reset by Jason Aaron when introducing the Avengers of the year 1,000,000 BC, showing a certain Mosi as the first to don the mantle of the hero. Comics stuff.
oh that license plate
One of the cars that we can see during the movie it has the registration CB112976. You don’t have to be a hawk to realize that it refers to Chadwick Boseman and his birth, November 29, 1976. Boseman came from very modest beginnings and ended up making it big on the big screen until his tragic end. It still hurts a little.
Toussaint
The film is full of little historical nods (for example, K’uk’ulkan was a Mayan winged serpent deity, which explains the little wings on Namor’s feet), but my favorite is this: T’challa’s son calls himself Toussaint. It seems like a random name, but nothing is further from the truth: Toussaint Louverture was an 18th century politician and soldier who led the Haitian Revolution and laid the foundations for the eradication of slavery in Haiti… And, later, the entire world.
What has escaped us? Does Riri’s first flight look like Iron Man’s first flight or is it just us? What do you think of that cameo by Lake Bell, who already voiced Black Widow in ‘What would happen if…?’? We will remain vigilant to catch all that Marvel is dropping.